Day 203 - Moon

Day 203           Moon [2009]

                          

Screenplay                     Nathan Parker

Director                          Duncan Jones

Cinematography             Gary Shaw

Music                             Clint Mansell

Leads                             Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Kaya Scodelario, Dominique McElligott

Production                      Stage 6 Films, Liberty Films, Xingu Films, Limelight

IMDb                                 8/10

Rotten Tomatoes                90%

Ok, granted that 2009 was a big year at the Oscars, with one of the best rosters in best picture and best acting categories, but a little part of me feels sorry for Sam Rockwell not being nominated for this performance. The very definition of putting a film on your back in Duncan Jones’ feature debut. Moon went under many people’s radars and has remained there.

It’s a sci-fi feature about one man on the moon and that man is Sam Bell (Rockwell). Sam works for Lunar Industries, a huge corporation who have profited from mining helium-3 from lunar soil. The mine is automated and only requires an individual human to monitor operations, provide maintenance and send canisters of the fuel back to earth. Sam is assisted by an A.I. computer named GERTY (Spacey). I try to avoid spoilers usually, but I’m afraid they are necessary here, so skip straight to the ratings if you don’t want me to ruin the movie. After having visions of a teenage girl Sam crashes his moon buggy into one of the mining units and awakes in the infirmary. This is where shit gets weird. We, the audience, think it’s the Sam we saw crash, but when he goes to check a problem with the mining unit new Sam finds old Sam in the crash and brings him back to the base. At first, I couldn’t tell whether Sam was going mad or whether new Sam was a clone. It turns out the latter, but I enjoyed the mindfuckery that ensued once we had multiple Sams. The film continues as Sam new and old discover that they are two of the many clones of an original Sam Bell, designed to live for three years and then be replaced.

The simple, aforementioned and best way to describe this film is: a mind fuck. I wrote it three times in my notes. I like films that present two equally plausible possibilities. Although the clone option was more likely than the mental breakdown option, they were both possible up to a point, and it made the film that much more intriguing. Moon also contained similarity aplenty with other sci-fi/space films: We had GERTY, an A.I. surely modelled on HAL 9000 (see Day 59) but with a bit of banter which reminded me of the robot repartee in Interstellar. GERTY weirdly shares a name with the supercomputer in the recently released Maniac series as well – I’m not sure that’s relevant – I just wanted to show off my referencing. There were also reminders of The Martian and Gravity, and even Blade Runner (Day 60/114) as the clones had memories implanted, but for some reason all the other space films were big hits, so why wasn’t this one? It was missing something, although hard to put my finger on it. It had excellent set design and cinematography, the acting was impeccable and the plot original. I think they could have spent more time on the emotions of the clones in their becoming self-aware. For example, the phone call in which the elder clone of Sam discovers his ‘wife’ is dead and his young ‘daughter’ is a teenager, lacked deep emotion and I’m not sure who to blame. Despite its commercial failure I would still highly recommend Moon, as a beautifully shot mind fuck of a film.

Acting                           4 / 4

Writing                       3.5 / 4

Cinematography         3.5 / 4

Music                            3 / 4

HWF rating            3.5 / 4